A year had passed, and the empire he built—towering companies, glossy magazine features, a mansion that looked like it belonged in a different world—had become irrelevant the moment Miles vanished. Arthur still owned everything, but none of it mattered because the one thing he couldn’t buy was the sound of his son’s footsteps on the stairs. Every morning he woke up to the same quiet, stared at the same untouched bedroom, and asked himself the same question with a bitterness that never dulled: what good was a fortune when love could be stolen so easily.
That morning, he wore the same wrinkled jacket he had been wearing more often lately, because he no longer cared about suits or tailored perfection.
The back seat of his car was packed with folded posters, tape rolls, and thick markers that bled through paper when he wrote the same phone number again and again. He drove away from polished avenues and glass towers into neighborhoods where the streets narrowed, paint peeled from walls, and life looked like it fought harder for every breath. Here, nobody cared who he was.
Here, he wasn’t a billionaire. He was just another man clinging to hope.
He stepped out onto cracked pavement and held a stack of posters against his chest as if they could keep him upright. The air smelled like hot concrete and cheap food, and the distant sound of traffic didn’t feel like life moving forward—it felt like the world continuing without his permission.
Arthur found a rusted pole near a corner store and pressed tape to it with hands that trembled from exhaustion, trying to smooth the paper the way a desperate person tries to smooth a life that refuses to cooperate. He whispered his son’s name under his breath, not as a prayer for miracles but as a stubborn refusal to accept an ending.
That was when a small voice appeared behind him, soft at first as if it didn’t want to be heard, then steadier as if the truth inside it demanded space.
“Sir,” the girl said, staring at the poster like she’d seen a ghost, “that boy lives in my house.”
Arthur froze so completely it felt like his body forgot how to exist. His heart, heavy for a year, suddenly slammed against his ribs like it had been shocked awake.
He turned slowly and saw a child standing barefoot on the sidewalk, her dress worn and faded, her eyes too large for her face, the kind of eyes that had learned to watch adults carefully. She pointed at the photo with a tiny finger, and the certainty in her posture didn’t match her size.
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